If you're a developer, listen up! We are hosting a meetup this Friday for anyone interested in learning about the programming language, Clojure. It's like Venture Fridays, but for programming nerds in Ruby, Python and Lamp.

How do you track and assess your website visitors? Take advantage of this free event to hear from local marketing professionals as they present on Omniture and Google Analytics. Learn how to best monitor what your visitors are doing on your site and where you might need to improve with the information from this session. See you on the 30th!

- Reduce costs by leveraging shared resources and usage based computing- Improve business agility with scalable and elastic on-demand capacity provisioning - Improve control over physical, virtual, and hybrid infrastructureLearn how with a Microsoft Private Cloud SolutionSpeaker: Tim Kremer, TSP – Datacenter Technologies, Microsoft.Discover how to get many of the benefits of public cloud computing—including self-service, scalability, and elasticity—with the additional control and customization available from dedicated resources.• Virtualization vs. Private Cloud• Components of a Cloud• What’s Possible Today?• Where are we going in the (very) near future?
Lunch will be provided

Alas! The Pizza Shoppe at 95th and Nall is no more! They closed Memorial Day weekend! For that reason we have moved the August Agile KC meeting to 6:30 p.m. Thursday August 25, 2011 (08/25/11) to another Pizza Shoppe location at 8915 Santa Fe Drive in Overland Park, KS (approximately 87th and Antioch). They don't offer the $8 all-u-can-eat bargain, but Pizza will be served! Map attached.
Agile and Scrum were forged in a crucible of debate confronting the entrenched waterfall model. To promote survival of the new concepts, early champions and advocates composed the “Agile Manifesto,” a succinct proposition that was articulated as values and principles. Today, organizations see dramatic outcomes without grasping that the results are not generated by Agile processes, but by Agile values.
James Peckam gave a presentation at this year's Kansas City Software Developers Conference which revisited the values on which Agile and Scrum were founded. The presentation discussed how Agile’s core values can influence the practices, techniques, pitfalls, patterns and anti-patterns that promote or plague Agile development. A subsequent provocative discussion explored the interplay of conflict, courage, and core values.
James, like many of us, succumbed in 1986 to the siren call of BASIC running on a Commodore 64. By 2003, this had lured him away from a short amateur music career as a bassist and into Information Technology. James started in software/hardware support, progressed into Software Development, and currently works as an Agile Coach/Team Facilitator where some have chosen to call him … ScrumMaster! James has participated on projects that vary from large scale hardware/software implementations to fast-paced start-up “hack-a-thons,” to rapid enterprise-scale web software releases. James is passionate about agile engineering including practices such as Extreme Programming, Behavior Driven Development (BDD), Lean, and Scrum. His certifications include the Certified Scrum Professional and Certified Associate of Project Management. In his spare time he enjoys dining out with his wife (especially BBQ and Thai), or online gaming with First Person Shooters and Massively Multi-player games.
So, reflect on this, the original Agile Manifesto, and we will see you on 08/25/11 at the NEW Pizza Shoppe:
We are uncovering better ways of developing
software by doing it and helping others do it.

Through this work we have come to value:
* Individuals and interactions over processes and tools
* Working software over comprehensive documentation
* Customer collaboration over contract negotiation
* Responding to change over following a plan
That is, while there is value in the items on
the right, we value the items on the left more.
Mark RandolphClick here for map

Our next meeting will be held:
6:30 PM, Wed, August 24, 2011
Centriq Training Center
8700 State Line Rd, Leawood, KS
(West side of State Line Rd, directly across from Ward Parkway Mall)
Sponsor: MCG
Food and door prizes will be provided by : MCG
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In order to ensure that we have enough food for you, please let Ray Harris know if you will be attending. Thanks very much !

This month's topic is:

Introduction to Windows Communication Foundation (WCF) and Azure (speaker: Leslie Koorhan)
Topic Synopsis: Windows Communication Foundation (WCF) is a unified approach to distributed computing, combining aspects of XML Web Services, .NET Remoting, MSMQ, and Enterprise Services. WCF was introduced in the .NET Framework 3.0 technologies, and continues to be expanded in 3.5 and 4.0. It is targeted for implementing Service Oriented Architectu! res (SOA), and is Microsoft’s flagship framework for distributed systems. Some of the Microsoft communication frameworks based in WCF include WCF Data Services, WCF RIA Services, Windows Azure AppFabric, and Windows Azure itself. A big subject, I will be focusing on how WCF services are hosted and the ABC’s of endpoints for a service. (Address, Binding and Contract).
Leslie Koorhan's BIO:
Leslie is a Microsoft Certified Trainer and on staff with Centriq Training for the past 4 years. His main focus is on .NET technologies and he serves as Centriq’s lead for new releases of Visual Studio and .NET. Leslie has been using and training .NET since the beginning, about 9 years now. Prior to that he was an Xbase developer, spending 8 years on various versions of FoxPro and Visual FoxPro, and also certified with VB6. Leslie is also proud of his knowledge of XML technologies and the fact that he has been working with SQL Server for 16 years.
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Our webs! ite URL is: http://www.kcwebpros.com

I sincerely apologize for the late notice on the meeting space. We worked hard to try to use the CCCKC Hacker Space (a.k.a: The Cave) for our hack-a-ton, but some scheduling conflicts prevented us from using the space. :'( we'd try to shoot again for next month, specially since I learned CCCKC will be leaving the cave very soon, so this might be one of our last chances to use it as a meeting space for PythonKC.

Fortunately Andrew Schoen and the Partners at Salva O'Renick were gracious enough to let us use their office again, so we'll be meeting at their location (1810 Cherry St # 100, Kansas City, MO) this coming Saturday (Aug 13) at 10:00 AM. I'm really looking forward to seeing everybody there and hearing about your cool projects.
Andrew also had an awesome idea of making this hack-a-ton very begineer friendly. He'll be gathering a group of new Python users and walk them through the environment set-up and maybe help them complete a few tutorials, both on Python and Django for everybody interested. So if you were waiting for something like this, this is going to be your chance to get your feet wet on Python or help someone else learn the language. It's also a perfect opportunity to bring your friends, co-workers, etc, and show them why you love Python and why they should give it a try!Andrew will be leading this effort so if you want to participate (as student or as tutor) contact him when you arrive.

There's also a lot of activity over at Convore (https://convore.com/pythonkc/) about the technologies and design of our future PythonKC page, so if you're planning to hack on our page on Saturday's meeting, be sure to check the threads on Convore, ask questions, give feedback and get familiar with the different ideas and concepts that re being discussed.

The Greater Kansas City Public Relations Society of America (KC PRSA) chapter invites you to an after hours event celebrating diversity in the Kansas City workforce. Join us on Thursday, August 11th at AIA Kansas City (1801 McGee St. #100) from 6-8 pm for the opportunity to hear from leaders in strategic diversity initiatives. The cost for this event is $10 per person (for members and non-members) which includes hors d'oeuvres, mixed domestic and imported beer and red and white wines. We will be live tweeting the day of the event with the hashtag #diverseKC. RSVP now at https://kansascity-prsa.org/meetinginfo.php?id=25.

This month we've decided to just have an old fashioned happy hour. That means we will be focusing on the socializing and won't feature any speakers or content. We're heading to one of our favorite watering holes in KC, Harry's Country Club. Harry has agreed to keep the happy hour drink prices going until 7:30pm. Come out and say hi! www.smckc.com